While messing around with a bunch of parts I purchased from Adafruit, I ended up building a solar powered Raspberry Pi.

The build is pretty simple once you get everything soldered on correctly.

I’ll be following up this tutorial with another post detailing the ‘why’ behind this project, the final product design, as well as some really cool software I’m building to demo what this device is capable of.

To get started building your own solar powered Pi, check out the materials list below. Once you’ve got that down, watch the video for a step-by-step tutorial on how to put it all together.

*Note: this is not a full tutorial – there are several installation steps involved that I do not cover, but you can find existing tutorials on how to acomplish this on learn.adafruit.com.

Right now I’m finishing up the case that houses everything, but I think the next thing to test is battery duration. I have two different sizes of LiPoly batteries so we’ll see if either can get us through the night.

The smaller one is 3.7v 2500ma and the larger one is 3.7v 6600ma – both are converted to 5v via a booster (the model B Pi takes 5v at around 4-500ma).

Some paper napkin calculations would say that powering just the Pi alone on the 2500ma (smaller battery) we should get 4-5 hours (also depends if we have wifi attached, etc.).

The bigger battery would certainly get us through the night (based on those calculations), but the size is annoying to fit into a case. It could be possible to rig up 2 of the 2500ma batteries in some way to double the time.

[…] need to plug my Pi into a wall or computer power source. This little detail will be eliminated once solar panel et al. arrive from Adafruit!*** I found myself in a precarious situation of late, having brought my Pi […]

Julian – you really don’t want to connect the PowerBoost to the LOAD output of the Solar Lipo Charger, since the solar panel can produce up to 6V at the LOAD. That is too much for the PowerBoost. Instead, you should connect the PowerBoost to the BAT pad so that it only sees the battery voltage.

Hi Alexis, I work at Voltaic. The solar panel used here only produces about 300 mA at 6V in direct sunlight (it’s the smallest panel we make) and a Raspberry Pi consumes about 600-1000 mA while running, therefore the main power source is the LiPo Battery while the panel slowly charges the battery.

Hi Julian. There was a comment above from Rick regarding plugging the PowerBoost into the BAT port instead of the LOAD port so that you avoid running 6v through the PowerBoost, but in this configuration, where would you put the battery itself? It surely can’t use the LOAD port instead? Seems dangerous. I want to try this out myself but the 6v panel problem is bugging me.

Great project, love the neat package! Could you help me with the choice of solar panel and batteries? I am trying to make automated insect trap. It would be be placed outdoor and would take one photo a day and send it through GPRS, so RPi and GPRS module. tnx…

you’ll need to know how much power your system consumes on a daily basis. Find out how many watts it uses then multiply by 24 to get the overall watt-hours select a battery that’s at least twice this big so that you can get through a full day of rain/clouds on the battery alone. Then select a solar panel that’s about 5-10X larger than the wattage you need. So if your system runs at 5V and draws 200mA consistently, that’s 1W so pick a panel that’s 5-10W.